Abstract
With the ageing of the ‘Baby Boomer’ cohort, more and more adults are transiting from work into retirement. In public discourse, this development is framed as one of the major challenges of today’s welfare societies. To develop social innovations that consider the everyday lives of older people requires a deeper theoretical understanding of the retiring process. In age studies, retiring has been approached from various theoretical perspectives, most prominently disengagement perspectives (retirement as the withdrawal from social roles and responsibilities) and rational choice perspectives (retiring as a rational decision based on incentives and penalties). Whereas the former have been accused of promoting a deficient image of ageing, the latter are criticized for concealing the socially stratified constraints older people experience. This paper proposes a practice-theoretical perspective on retiring, understanding it as a processual, practical accomplishment that involves various social practices, sites, and human, as well as non-human, actors. To exemplify this approach, I draw upon data from the project “Doing Retiring” that follows 30 older adults in Germany from one year before to three years after retirement. Results depict retiring as a complex process of change, assembled by social practices that are scattered across time, space, and carriers. Practice sequences and constellations differ significantly between older adults who retire expectedly and unexpectedly, for example through sudden job loss or illness. However, even among those who envisaged retiring ‘on their own terms,’ the agency to retire was distributed across the network of employers, retirement schemes, colleagues, laws, families, workplaces, bodies and health, and the future retiree themselves. Results identified a distinct set of sequentially organized practices that were temporally and spatially configured. Many study participants expressed an idea about a ‘right time to retire’ embedded in the imagination of a chrononormative life-course, and they often experienced spatio-temporal withdrawal from the workplace (e.g., reduction of working hours) which entailed affective disengagement from work as well. In conclusion, a practice-theoretical perspective supports social innovations that target more than just the retiring individual.
Highlights
With the aging of the “Baby Boomer” cohort, more and more adults are—and will, in the decade, be—transiting into retirement
This paper proposes a practice-theoretical perspective on retiring, understanding it as a processual, practical accomplishment that involves various social practices, sites, and human, as well as non-human, actors
With increasing changes in the work-retirement landscape, research is confronted with the need for, and opportunity to, re-think theories on the transition from work to retirement (Phillipson, 2018)
Summary
With the aging of the “Baby Boomer” cohort, more and more adults are—and will, in the decade, be—transiting into retirement. This paper will focus on results from the first wave of data collection of the qualitative panel study, focusing on the “separation stage” or period within the retiring process before persons receive old age pension benefits and are formally retired. The interviews would begin with an open narrative-biographical invitation to elaborate on their occupational histories, starting— as work trajectories were the focus of the interview—with their education (many people did refer to their childhood and parents, as well as to their private lives in the course of the interviews) After this narrative period, which would last for ∼45 min, participants were asked about retiring—including questions on how and when they first thought about retiring, what they think will change when they retire, what they plan to do in their retirement, which retiring processes they observe among their peers and what they would advise others who think about retiring to do and consider, as well as what a typical week in their lives looked like. The analyses presented in this paper are mainly based upon the first step of data interpretation
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